The Moz Blog

Learn SEO in 30 Minutes a Day

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Learning SEO can be a daunting experience. To make this process a little easier, I have broken down my method for learning SEO into bite-sized chunks that can be completed in 30 minutes or less. I have also tried to create a mechanism to make it easier to get help and expand personal networks.

Twitter Participation:
I think the best benefit of learning SEO is getting to know the SEO community. As an experiment to facilitate this, I propose the following. While you complete the tasks below, feel free to share your progress on Twitter with the Hash Tag #30MinuteSEO. This will make it easier to find people who are doing the same thing and willing to help you. :-)

Learn SEO in 30 Minutes a Day

Learn the Basics:
Your first group of tasks will teach you the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization. You get to start slow by reading some helpful articles.

30 Minute Tasks:

Read the new Beginner's Guide to SEO (30 mins) - This is the table of contents for the upcoming revision to the Beginner's Guide to SEO. (Note the ‘Parts’ are links to full articles.) I recommend this version over its predecessor because its material is more focused on today's SEO landscape.

Read Google’s Starter Guide to SEO (30 mins) - Isn’t reading two beginner guides to SEO redundant? The information might be, but this will teach you to recognize and appreciate Google’s perspective on SEO. (As a side note, notice the juxtaposition between the message Google is saying and the SEO unfriendly URL structure of this page. This is your first chance to study the difference between what Google says and how Google acts. Oh snap!)

Build a Basic Website (4 sets of 30 mins) - The Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO will guide you through the process of building a basic website and teach you the basic SEO skills you need. (I apologize for linking to my own work. I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t believe it was worthy.)

Example Tweet: Does anyone have any SEO advice for my new website at www.example.com #30MinuteSEO

Start Using Your Skills:
Your second group of tasks requires applying the theories you just learned. These tasks are presented as SEO challenges that will utilize everything you learned in the previous section and depend on your own creativity. Note: The work for these will take about 30 minutes. The time it takes for the content to actually get indexed may be much longer.

30 Minute Tasks:

Rank for a long tail phrase (30 mins) - Choose a long tail keyword phrase and figure out how to rank for it. When I did this exercise nearly two years ago, I chose “fat people falling”. Please be aware that the subject manner and the language of the ranking page may be NSFW. It was written for a very specific audience and may be offensive to others. Hint: See if you can figure out how I got this page to rank with only one inbound link.

Rank in the top 10 in a local search (2 sets of 30 mins) - Find an actual small business that you appreciate and volunteer to do SEO at no cost. When I did this two years ago, I chose the preschool I originally attended and helped them rank in their area. Hint: Read David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: If you are in the Seattle area, be sure to check out Example Pastry #30MinuteSEO

Rank an image (30 mins) - The image vertical is one of the most confusing search realms to work in. Dive in and see if you can get a relevant image to rank for a phrase of your choice. Hint: Read Google Image Search Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: Look at the third image result on bing.com for “example”. Awesome! #30MinuteSEO

Rank in the top 10 for a popular term on YouTube (30 mins) - Compared to the search engines, ranking in YouTube is a piece of cake. Try to rank for a semi-competitive term with a worthwhile video. When I originally did this, I ranked for a popular culture phrase and my relevant video made me $10,000 theoretical dollars. Hint: Read YouTube Ranking Factors

Example Tweet: I now rank #4 on YouTube for “Example” #30MinuteSEO

Outrank Google (3 sets of 30 mins) - This is an exercise with the domain-related metrics. Find a REALLY long tail phrase that Google ranks #1 for and see if you can create a page that can outweigh the domain strength of the big G. I have been experimenting with Google's spam filters and I am seeing if I can outrank Google Webmaster Central forums with my awesome website What Is The Best Thing To Do With a Colt with Five Hooves.com

Pitch SEO to a real client (2 sets of 30 mins) - This is the hardest but possibly most important task on this list. Go out and find a small business and sell them on your ability to do SEO. You will likely learn a lot about SEO and yourself in this process.

Continue Learning:

After completing the tasks above, it is a good idea to spend 30 minutes a day reading SEO blogs - I recommend the following:

SEOmoz Blog - SEO blog with a focus on teaching SEO. (Disclaimer - SEOmoz pays my bills and may have been the bearer of my first child. The jury is out.)

Sphinn - A fair amount of fluff, but generally the first source to break inner-industry news.

Alltop SEO - Great source for SEO News. Highly recommended the SEOmoz community in the comments below this post.

Example Tweet on Twitter: Enjoying this post at searchengineland.com/post/example/ #30MinuteSEO

Study Advanced SEO:
This group of tasks has less direct return on investment but can lead to big wins. I try to complete these at least once a month.

30 Minute Tasks:

Review ultra competitive Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) (30 mins) - Watch the progress of SERPs like “Buy Viagra”, “Real Estate” and “Payday Loans”. Most of the techniques used to rank for these are Black Hat but it is important to know what you might be up against.

Find a site that outranks Wikipedia and try to figure out why (2 sets of 30 mins) - This will likely help you with later work. Wikipedia’s domain strength is incredible. Find and study the sites that outrank it because they generally use the best SEO tactics.

Attend search conference parties (4 sets of 30 mins) - Don’t get distracted by the people exchanging short term tricks and tips. Instead, mingle and start to talk to some of the most interesting people you will ever meet.

Extra Tasks:
These tasks are more difficult and only indirectly apply to SEO

Write up an SEO-oriented resume (2 sets of 30 mins) - From what I have seen, when businesses are facing hard economic times they look inward to see what current assets they can maximize. This means that SEO is a great skill set to have when companies are looking to attract free search engine traffic. Hint: You can add your resume to the SEOmoz Marketplace

Review HTML Tags (30 mins) - In the same way that the typewriter dictated the course of keyboards, (the QWERTY layout was originally designed to prevent collisions on typewriters) HTML dictates the course of the internet. Become an HTML expert and your skills will apply for the rest of your life.

Sign up for Social Media (30 mins) - If you haven’t already, sign up for Twitter, Facebook and any other social media sites that you find interesting. Start building your personal brand and make it work for you.

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!

About DannyDover —
Danny Dover is a passionate online marketer, influential writer and obsessed bucket list completer. He is the author of the best selling book Search Engine Optimization Secrets and the founder of Intriguing Ideas LLC. Before starting his own company, Danny was the Senior SEO Manager at AT&T and the Lead SEO at SEOmoz.org.

42 Comments

Wow - another knock-out post Danny. This is an awesome road-map for anyone getting into SEO. I love that you include in that list both experimental actions (rank for a long-tail kephrase) and investigative actions (figure out why site X ranks) as these are the actions which I think provide the most value!

Definitely. This may seem dumb but building your own little site and doing all these experiments is the fastest way to learning the game. I know quite a few people who just read and read and research and never actually do it. And when you start off playing with non-competitive keywords you'll see results way faster and at least give yourself some confidence when you start ranking for longtail keywords.

Another 30 minute task: Write a YOUmoz post. Writing down what you have done for others to comment on can be a great way of solidifying your knowledge and connecting with others in the industry. A post about your experiences learning SEO and sharing some of the things that worked (and some that didn't) would go down well on YOUmoz.

While I would agree that writing about any suggest will allow you to cement and further your knowledge I would question your advice on where to post this information.If you are looking to learn about SEO why not start your own blog, detailing the things that you have learned, mistakes you have made, things that have or haven’t worked etc? A very important rule for anyone to learn would be that you should never (well almost never)add value to other peoples sites when that value could be added to your own. If you have something to say or are looking to communicate your ideas with the world then do so for yourself. That way you get to benefit from the content, the traffic and hopefully the links that the content brings.

I really couldn't disagree more...the abundance of "newbie" SEO advice out there is sickening. I see what you are getting at by saying do it on your own blog but it's bad advice. There should be SOME time spent establishing a reputation and some connections who will spend the time to read you, you can use these relationships to leverage publicity and exposure, whereas if you go into these expecting to be 'recognized' from your blog, you're going to have a tough time.

Hmm...I have to disagree with your point about not ever adding value to someone else's site when you could add it to your own. I think that by doing guest posts on other's sites you're actually providing a great deal of value (hopefully) to their site as well as to your own. By doing so, you're adding quality content (again, hopefully) to their site, helping them out, spreading your name to a different group of readers then your own site nornmally reaches, and driving traffic for both sites; all of these things ultimately mutually benefit both parties. Even better if you get a link to your own site :)

I have been visiting SEOMoz for awhile now and have pretty much stepped through your suggestions (except the Twitter). It is a great way to learn and I have improved my Search Engine Ranking. It's a work in progress. I recommend your suggestions to anyone starting out.

This is post is really really useful. Thank you very much. I am trying to educate people in my country about SEO by writing some spanish articles in my personal blog about what that hell is SEO, on-page tactics, off-page tactics, etc, because you know, SEO is not a well-known matter in countries where English is not the main language. I am going to use this post like a guide in order to give gradual pieces of knowledge for people of Latin America and my country. Thanks again!

I liked your idea to share our SEO activities on Twitter. Also I am suggesting to write blog post on his daily SEO activities (may be it takes more then 30 minutes) and ask questions related to SEO in Twitter.

Wow Danny. I was a little skeptical about this one because of the title, but you even managed to include some good advice that applies to all levels SEO's. The Wikipedia tip is especially brilliant. Great post!

The links you have provided are very informative and would greatly benefit any beginner in this area. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is fast becoming the web's most powerful tool. Implementing keywords and background links throughout your website will generate a vast amount of traffic. The link to 'Keyword Usage & Targeting' is spot on and clearly promotes which techniques are required to properly insert keywords. - Great advice!